Tuesday December 23, 2008

This post to one of the Hadoop mailing lists caught my eye, Announcing CloudBase-1.1 release. Wait, wasn't Cloudbase the embedded database company that IBM acquired several years back but ended up donating the product to the Apache Software Foundation as Derby? No, not that Cloudbase. This is apparently another project that aims to provide data warehousing on top of Hadoop.

I've been watching the emergence of HBase, Hypertable and most recently the proposed incubation of Facebook's Cassandra with great interest. The first two are modeled from Google's BigTable but all are essentially horizontally scalable column oriented databases. The developers of these systems explicitly steer away having their technologies pegged as relational databases, with the refrain: "We don't do joins." What the CloudBase project aims to do is not model themselves on BigTable but to explicitly support joins between tables built on top of an HDFS cluster. It looks like they've posted extensive documentation and have released a JDBC driver, pretty cool! This is the most interesting database initiative I've seen since GreenPlum announced their support for mapreduce.

Yes, as far as scale-out data analytics, we live in interesting times.

mapreduce   hadoop   hbase   hypertable   jdbc   cloudbase   bigtable   derby   greenplum